Have you ever had Unattractive Art

[LCT_m_a_d]

By Unattractive I don't mean technically bad/undeveloped.
I mean your method/aesthetic is doesn't have the appeal factor, or the way you draw something doesn't really spark excitement to any audience. If so, did you change your style? Did you do something?

Curious as to your experience.

[NickRowler]

I feel like my art back in 2011 looks really vile. I am not sure anyone would want to read a comic with characters that looked like this. I ended changing the way I draw the following year. I did have a comic planned for the conehead people but never went through with it which is probably for the best.

[Lensing]

I´m doing commissions and customers always have aesthetic wishes.
It´s usually about the coloring. I had a time when I tried to color like Jim Flora because
in my opinion he has a very good limited palette he worked in, he made a lot of jazz
record designs. I think it´s really tasteful.
Customers don´t think like that, when someone makes music for kids they don´t
want a limited, tasteful color palette, they want all the bright colors of the rainbow,
even though it looks horrible. So there is the conflict, I don´t want to put my name
under something that looks horrible and on the other hand I want to satisy the
customer who pays me. So I usually go for a compromise and make it look least
horrible possible.

You can´t satisfy every customer and some also change their opinion after talking
to different people and one day they find something attractive and after talking
to their wife they don´t find it attractive anymore

Here is a picture of Jim Flora illustration

[Aeneas1]

My earlier art, as the first chapters of Nixvir indicate, looked extremely ugly when I first started. You see, I was only starting out in the OEL manga business using Christopher Hart’s book, and was having a hard time. That said, months of hard work have led me to improve since then.

[Sinicalcomics]

heres my old art from middle school, im out of high school now (age 19) its changed so much like its crazy. my art is still flawed but this gives me hope that my art will become godly within the next 10 years! i used to think i would never get better at art, i wish i could show my 14 year old self my current art so he could know how much better he gets

my art now!

[Lensing]

It will get godly and it´s already super godly compared to my art when I was 19

My art looked really horrible from a technical point of view for the first 5 years of intense learning and you are
already over that point. My plan was to get good in 5 years and it looked like shit, I couldn´t not draw anything
in perspective, I was not able to draw simple figures from imagination or connect legs to the torso, I thought
I would never get this. I showed it to a more experienced artist and he told me that I will be good in another
5 years and that it takes around 10 years of training to become good. Of course this is just theoretical and
depends on many things. I now think he was right about it, I´m 6,5 years in with the intense training. I will be good
in another 3,5 years

[Llyrel]

Around 2011-2014 my art style used to be much more realistic and much, much darker. Not a whole lot of gore or actual horror stuff, just... very stark contrasts and dark themes overall.

Some notable examples would be this drawing of Jorn (made using one of Vishstudio's photos as reference):

This fan art of Anders from Dragon Age 2:

Or this photomanipulation here:

The reactions I would get from these would usually be something along the lines of "ew, scaryyyy", "it's so DARK!" and "you KNOW that children are never gonna like something like this, right?" (spoiler: I knew it. And thing is, I had absolutely no intention of becoming a children's illustrator. But since in Italy children's illustration is apparently the only thing illustrators are allowed to do, most publishers -whose works included stuff for both kids AND adults- would still turn me down). I would also have a lot of trouble trying to get ANY sort of traction on social media with those pieces. The few surviving realistic drawings I have on Deviantart (like this one) are STILL the ones with the lowest amount of likes XD

I ended up toning down the darkness and the realism A LOT.
I still use cool tones, semirealism and tons of textures in my work (and I still get told that my style is "gritty" to which I can't help but think "oh, you sweet summer child... if only you had seen my stuff from ten years ago "), but apparently the trick DID work somehow, since stuff like this:

...Which took me literally 28 minutes in Procreate to make (as opposed to the 15+ hours of that first drawing), is now one of my most popular pieces on my social pages.

(And yes, I'm VERY bitter about this. But hey, it sells, so there's that I guess).

[TheLemmaLlama]

Oh, I thought you meant if we ever tried to draw something that's meant to look unattractive Well I'd say my art style used to be unattractive, but it definitely was because it was technically bad/undeveloped XD

[darthmongoose]

This is kind of a tough one because it's like... where do I draw the line of separation between "I was still developing as an artist" and "this was a dreadful style"? I think I feel like I have an old comic where it's definitely not JUST "I was still developing".

So back in.... I'm not sure but I reckon I must have drawn these around 2000-2001? I got really into a webcomic called "RPG World", which was a parody of JRPGs, particularly the tropes of JRPGS in the late 90s (Fun fact! It was created by Ian J Q, who would later go on to become instrumental as an animator and character designer on Steven Universe and create the show OK-KO! Hero from RPGworld even cameos as an action figure in Steven Universe.) I decided I wanted to make my own comic about.... basically the same thing. Except with a manga style heavily influenced by Megatokyo.

Just gonna take a second here to judge past me for writing this whole thing in papyrus... all right, anyway...

For some reason teenage Kate decided that inking everything in fineliner, colouring the characters in pencil crayon and then colouring everything else in Photoshop in EYE-MELTING GRADIENTS was a good idea. Also dog face profiles! Which... okay to be fair to teenage me, that was a really dominant way of drawing faces in profile in comics and anime at the time and I don't think the online backlash against it had started up yet. The art style is seriously aping the webcomic Megatokyo, which I hugely admired... but was a weird thing for me to imitate when my aesthetic sense really isn't anything like Piro's!

Getting into more shounen manga that started coming out in the years shortly after this, like Naruto, Bleach and Fullmetal Alchemist, as well as trying to draw more like Tetsuya Nomura after seeing his full-body characer illos of the characters in Final Fantasy X, and then getting into American superhero comics in around 2005 shifted how I drew characters, and some time spend making black and white comics helped me see the advantage of a consistent pipeline for creating pages as well as how to use tone and saturation more carefully to create a sense of depth. Also I realised that pencil crayons are really not suited to my style.

[rajillustration]

attractive is pretty subjective, so I think of it not as "here's my improvement" in this context, but as "this is what my style used to be, in a time period where this sort of thing used to be attractive." Because every art style has been attractive to someone at some time. So like in art school, I got hella into more retro textures and acrylic and having darker color themes and contrast. I also really enjoyed works by abstract painters like Wassily Kandinsky because he was able to do really interesting technical things that made neat textures that I tried to apply (unsuccesfully) to illustration.

This made sense because at the time I was learning it was like 20 years ago and computers and Iphones were everywhere but they weren't how we consumed media as often--we would youknow...buy books. I was taught by professors who were freelance magazine and newspaper illustrators, where intense, toothy grungy texture was king because of how quickly it could be painted. Newspaper illustration, in particular, has to be able to start and finish a painting in the matter of 3-4 hours. We couldn't use bright ass colors because they couldn't be reproduced with printers unless you spent a lot of money to buy flourescent ink (and yes, I had a friend who did that for a comic run he did. He had to kickstart it because it was so expensive to print.)

And like I painted too dark for print, honestly, and constantly got dinged for it when I was graded, but my work looked a lot like this:

And truth is, I still really like this style when I see it, this loosey goosey Tim Burton character design with the grunge and steampunk flare. That warm lighting reminescent of Twilight Princess fog--I still love this stuff although it wouldn't work now that we expect to see digital art that is highly rendered because you can just zoom like hell, and art that is very saturated because we no longer have to print. We just use social media.

So, when I felt more confident in my ability to paint and realized that my style was dated, I started making a style that worked better for an online audience. Now my art is vibrant and polished, because I could have done it the whole time, I was just interested in retro looks and painting techniques that were pretty 90's even in the 00's. I no longer use heavy acrylic medium to drybrush my art, I'm completely digital, and I expect I will probably change again depending on work and technology. Maybe we can go back to acrylic one day? That was a fun time.

[DualDragons]

Sigh...unzips

[simonitropunk]

Oh man, did I ever.

There was a time period that I hated my art. Hate is such a strong word but yeah... let me show you some artwork from back then around 2004/2005:

Today:

[LCT_m_a_d]

Yeah, this is more what I'm talking about!
Really insightful, and something for me to think about.

[IzzyBloom91]

Yeah, At the time I was so happy with this but that was back using Manga Debut 4 and I think I was 13 at the time this digital art was made (I think I was either using Window vista or XP, Can't remember). At the time, I was happy at the time because I did this with a mouse and a shitty computer that kept crashing
Looking at it now makes me feel weird.

This is how I am drawing now, I would like to think that I have improved since then

[beazdreams]

I don't usually post my art anymore, but it was, for a long time, "generic anime look" to the point someone mistakenly attributed my drawings to someone else I still draw from time to time and it's still anime looking lmao but I feel it's less of a Tanemura Arine wannabe to a more personal style

[LCT_m_a_d]

Having that eye for just knowing what art to share is really tricky too because it can really change how your body of work is presented and seen.

[BreakingChalk]

Well, there was this point where I switched from cartoony to "realistic" because I didn't knew I could change my style until then.

It wasn't fit for the style of stories I make now and it surely wasn't actually realistic nor pleasing to look at, but it did help me add more detail to my character designs, which is something I still struggle with up until this day.

[system]

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